Soft Opening announces a solo exhibition of new work by London-based artist Ebun Sodipo.
Using processes of research and storytelling, Sodipo seeks to subvert notions of race, gender, sexuality and systems of power, as defined by history, its images and their communication. Through a practice that incorporates assemblage, sculpture, archiving, film, poetry and performance, Sodipo at once mines ancestral knowledge and contemporary visual culture for Black transfeminine experience, interrogating where the record of this presence exists within the archive of Black experience.
Much of the artist’s research for her performance practice focuses on Vitoria, an enslaved African transgender woman living in Lisbon in the 16th century. Vitoria was a healer and sex worker living in Lisbon’s waterfront, who attracted the attention of the Portuguese Inquisition and was sentenced to her perpetual imprisonment as a rower on the King of Portugal’s galleys. Originally from Benin in modern-day Nigeria, Vitoria stated in her trial that women where she was from had bodies like hers, gesturing to an alternative gender system and way of relating to the body. Developed using the transcripts from her trial, and scholarship on her life, Sodipo’s work focuses on her relationship to Vitoria’s archive and what it means to discover this figure.
In her collage works, Sodipo utilizes assemblage as a technique to realize the formation of both collective and personal narrative. Incorporating material from an extensive archive of found digital imagery sourced online into large-scale collages, together in these works the artist embodies, reconstructs and reinterprets both social and art history. By referencing forms of Black womanhood and trans-femininity, Sodipo explores the complexities of aspiration, intimacy, sensuality, gender euphoria, witchcraft, desire, fantasy, surgery and adornment. With every image selected based on its content, context and associations, Sodipo’s compositions seek to restore neglected figures from the past and by doing so, imagine and plot a trajectory for trans futures. Arranged across the reflective metallic surface of Mylar and coated in a thick layer of clear resin, Sodipo immortalizes the figures, phrases and scenes that she assembles.
Ebun Sodipo: 7 March–26 April, 2025
Soft Opening, 6 Minerva Street, London E2 9EH
Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm
Further Information: Soft Opening, London